Wireless communication networks 100 may use mutual information (MI) 121 as shown in FIG. 1 to represent the channel quality or the corresponding reception performance. An estimate of mutual information between the transmitted signal at a transmitter 110, e.g. a base station and the received signal at a receiver 120, e.g. a mobile terminal of a communication link may be based on limited observations at the receiver 120. As such, MI estimates 121 are widely used for a variety of applications. One such application is link monitoring, whereby MI estimates 121 are used to help the receiver 120 decide in choosing appropriate transmitter 110 to connect with. Another application is link adaptation, whereby MI estimates 121 are used to derive signal parameters such as preferred rank, pre-coding, modulation order, channel code rate, etc., that are fed back to the transmitter 110 and are used to modify aspects of the transmit signal, e.g. direction of the transmitted signal 123 and spatial coverage of the signal 125, for more reliable communication.